(Disclaimer: Don't transmogrify things that shouldn't exist yet, and sell them on eBay.)
Episode 2:2- The End of the World
Rose woke in a room. A big, spacious room with not much in the way of furnishing, except for a small table at one end, and a note of lined paper, saying, 'bye, bye!' with a smiley face. She groaned. "Of all the people I had to insult..."
"Sun filter rising," interrupted a computerized voice, and her eyes widened. "Oh no."
She raced to the door, which was, predictably, locked. She banged on it for a moment, before giving up, and racing to pick up the table before the sun burnt it up. A small sliver of pure white light slid up the window, and began to creep over the floor, sizzling as it did. Rose chose not to look at it, and instead began to bang on the door with the table. All she succeeded with this was splintering the table into pieces.
"Hobbes?" she called. She could hear the pounding of furry feet on the floor, followed by someone yelling- "she's in here!"
"Rose?" Hobbes asked. "You okay?"
"I would be, if there wasn't the fact that deadly sun rays are about to burn me up?"
"Is that so?"
The now-familiar zapping of the Transmogrifier Gun reached her ears, and the computer said, quite calmly, "Sun filter descending". And then, just as quickly, it told the room at large, "Sun filter rising".
"All taken care of, huh," Rose said sardonically.
"Working on it, working on it," Calvin told her through the door.
What followed was a ping-pong battle of "Sun filter rising" and "Sun filter descending", and Rose was becoming slightly worried that she was never going to get out of the room. Maybe she would get fried. Or maybe not.
She sat down, leaning heavily against the door- still closed- and pulled the tree sapling out of her pocket.
"Hello," she greeted it. "I'm Rose. That's a type of plant. We might be related."
"You're talking to a plant," came Calvin's muffled voice.
"Well, if you'd just hurry up..."
"We're on it," Hobbes assured her. There was a grunt, and a crash, then an electrical buzzing, followed by a loud ZAP. The sun filter stopped in the middle of a "Sun filter descending" and stayed there at halfway. Rose breathed out a sigh of relief. "What did you do?" she asked.
"We jammed the computer system," Hobbes informed her. "But we can't get you out."
"Can't you use the Transmogrifier Gun thing?"
"Actually, you're right. We can."
There was a ZAP, and the door became a movie poster for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part II. Rose examined it quickly, before brushing past it to greet Calvin and Hobbes.
"Awesome sauce," Calvin grinned, rubbing his hands together. "Now, I believe we had a talking trampoline to capture?"
CRACK.
The three of them looked up simultaneously.
"Sun filter rising," declared the computer system all over the Platform.
"Oh, that is not good..." hissed Hobbes, beginning to back away down the hallway. "The spiders must be bringing down the gravity satellites already."
"What should we do?" Rose was beginning to panic slightly.
"Reset the manual shields," Calvin told them grimly. "Computer, bring up the schematics for Platform One."
His ever-present wristwatch whirred, and a slowly rotating hologram rose from it.
"We're here," Calvin explained tersely, jabbing a finger at a red cross. "and we need to get to the engines, which are here at the green cross."
Hobbes and Rose nodded.
"Let's go," he growled, closing off the hologram.
"Yes, sir." Rose saluted.
They dashed off along the corridor, Calvin pointing out the directions to go. They paused for a moment at a large, metal bound door. Calvin zapped it with the Transmogrifier Gun, and it turned into a bunny rabbit. A really tiny one. Rose scooped it up, and placed it in her pocket, next to the sapling. And they continued on.
Soon they came into a room with pillars dotting across a large cavern. And the pillars didn't look exactly natural either. Neither did the raging lava covering the floor at the base of the pillars.
"Lava is not supposed to be on a spaceship," Calvin protested. Hobbes shrugged.
"Probably Cassandra's fault," he deduced. "But there's only one thing we can really do here."
"What?" Rose asked.
"Transmogrify," he grinned. With three quick ZAPS, Calvin and Hobbes became falcons, and Rose became a bat. They flew across the heat struck area, and when they had reached the other side, Hobbes turned them back into their original forms.
"WHY the HELL did you turn me into a BAT?" she stormed. Hobbes shrugged, and Calvin just grinned.
"We need to keep moving," he urged her. She crossed her arms tightly over her chest, and growled ferally. "Okay, okay! I'm sorry! I'll get you a dress or something!"
They continued on down a long metallic hallway in complete darkness. The only source of light was at the very end of it, and it was a tiny pinprick.
"Aren't you not supposed got into the light?" Hobbes asked conversationally.
"Well, can you hear your dead ancestors calling out to you?"
"I can't even REMEMBER my ancestors."
"You should be fine."
At this point they had reached the light, which turned out to be sitting on top of a slightly raised platform. And beyond the platform was...
"Oh, damn," Rose gulped.
It was a complex array of whirring fan blades, with no discernable way through. The only thing that could possibly help them was, apparantly, a small button inset into the wall. Calvin pressed it experimentally. The fans slowed down, and stopped entirely.
"Hot dog!" he cheered, and let go of the button, making as if to go through the fan-lined area. As soon as he released the pressure, the fans began again, and he jumped back hurriedly. After a bit of experimenting, it appeared that the fans only stopped when someone was holding the button down. Which left them with a problem.
"Who's going to be the one that stays behind?" Calvin asked them all.
"Not me," Hobbes quickly declared. Calvin nodded an affirmative, and pointed at Rose.
"You, then."
"No way!" she exclaimed. Calvin pouted.
"Why not? You'll be the safest out of all of us- you won't be killed by giant fans, and you won't have to confront Cassandra."
"Oh yeah?" She pointed down the corridor. Lava was slowly but steadily creeping towards them. There was a slight moment of silence.
"Okay, maybe you will get killed, then."
"What are we going to do, you moron!" she screamed. Calvin thought for a moment.
"Give me the rabbit!" he demanded.
"What rabbit?"
"The one in your pocket!" Rose reached into her pocket and pulled out the fluffy white bundle, and handed it quickly to him. He drew the Transmogrifier Gun from his pocket and placed the bunny directly over the button, so it held it down and made the fans stop. "There's not enough power in the gun for a full molecule change, but if I change the basic structure..."
The gun ZAPped the rabbit. Its muscles stiffened, and it turned into granite.
The fans were still off.
"Go, go, go!" Hobbes urged her, and they dashed down the aisle of fans as quickly as they could, outrunning the lava by far. Rose felt a slight flicker in her vision, and for a moment they were in the desert, surrounded by creatures of nightmares, but then they were back in the bowels of Platform One, and she dismissed it as unimportant.
At the end of the corridor, a small electronic device was lying, discarded, on the ground. Calvin snatched it up, and stared at it for a moment. "Teleport," he diagnosed, and began pressing buttons. It beeped. "Hold onto my arm," he directed. Rose and Hobbes did so, and the world dissolved around them.
They staggered to their feet in a large, extravagantly decorated room.
"I wasn't entirely sure that would work," admitted Calvin sheepishly. Rose and Hobbes glared. He shook his head. "Okay, I'll make it up to you later."
Footsteps outside.
Without making a sound, they all dived for hiding places. Calvin hid himself in the gap between the couch and the metal wall, and Rose rolled under the tablecloth for the work desk. She didn't get to see where Hobbes had gone, and so assumed that he must have done a good job, because at that moment the sliding door opened, and Cassandra rolled herself in.
"Oh, you should have seen their faces," she laughed, presumably into a communications device. "The darlings never knew what hit them. None of them escaped."
Calvin stood up from behind the couch, and Rose rolled out and jumped to her feet. Cassandra paused. "Oh."
"Yes, exactly," Calvin replied.
"Wait. where's that tiger of yours?" she demanded.
"On the light," he said casually. Hobbes dropped, flailing, onto Cassandra's frame, and Rose chanced a look upwards. The light was tiny, not big enough to hold Hobbes at all.
"How does that work?" she asked. Calvin shrugged.
"TV contracts."
There was an awkward pause while everyone tried to figure that out. While everybody was distracted, Hobbes took the opportunity to grab the teleport. With a massive ZAP, they were back on Platform One. The heat was sweltering, and Cassandra gasped from the pressure of the heat waves.
"Now you know how it felt to the steward," Hobbes told her. Cassandra's thin skin was already beginning to crack from the heat.
"Moisturise me," she said in a small voice. Her skin was billowing and flexing in the heat. Calvin shook his head.
"Do something! She's going to die!" cried Rose. Calvin remained impassive.
"She should've died centuries ago. She was only delaying the inevitable."
With one last cry, Cassandra, the Last of the Humans, was gone. Her only remains were ashes that quickly blew away. Platform One was collapsing.
"Quick, to the Time Machine!" Hobbes yelled. And they were running again. Always running, reflected Rose with the hint of a smile.
"The Earth is gone," Rose realised, suddenly. They were back in the Time Machine. "The Earth is gone, and nobody saw it go. They were all..."
"Mmm," agreed Calvin, working at the console. "That's the problem with humans. We're all so busy, always wanting to be at the right place at the right time, but...more often than not, we're always late. I wish I was a tiger."
"Can't you use your Transmogrifier Gun?"
"Only works for an hour or so at a time. Besides, last time I tried it, it was slightly disappointing."
"How so?"
Calvin immediately clammed up, and Hobbes snickered. "Okay, you don't have to tell me. So, where next?"
Hobbes moved over, and hit a few buttons.
They stood in the middle of busy London, taking in the sights and smells.
"I think we all needed that," Hobbes sighed, and the other two agreed. Just the knowledge that, somewhere, sometime, Earth existed was a great comfort to them all. They walked a short distance to a park bench, and sat down. If anyone had looked over at that moment, all they would have seen was a teenage girl, and a younger boy, perhaps her brother, with a toy tiger.
"So, where do you come from?" Rose asked eventually.
"America," Calvin answered shortly. He didn't seem inclined to give any more details, and Hobbes took over.
"Our home town is trapped in a time loop," he sighed. "It's why Calvin is perpetually six. He figured it out about ten relative years ago, and we built the Time Machine so we could escape."
"Doesn't anyone miss you?"
"No. We've got a duplicate of us back there, and besides," he gave her a pained smile. "I don't think anyone would miss us anyway."
There was a long silence between the three.
"You know what..." Rose began. "I think... I think..." She paused. "I think I need- chips!"
Her nose caught the smell of some freshly baked London chips. Calvin caught onto the thought, and jumped up. "Great idea!"
Pause.
"...for a slimy girl."
Rose laughed and elbowed him in his ribs, standing up as well. "Come on, I can see a place. It's called..." she squinted. "...the Malo Lupo. Wonder what that means."
"No idea. I'm not Google Translate or something."
They walked off, chattering happily.
"...who's paying?"
"Not me. Dad won't give me allowance."
"Fine, you cheapskate. I will... if you'll let a slimy girl pay, that is."
"Oh, just this once, then."
(A/N:
Yay! Second episode done! The Unquiet Dead is coming soon. I hope you liked the way I haven't actually followed the storyline of the original. Plus, I've done some foreshadowing. See if you can spot it.
~Kitty)